How I built a 31-class AI coding academy with zero lines of hand-written code
I'm Robert McCullock, solo founder of Design Delight Studio in Boston. I run a sustainable streetwear brand. About a year ago I started rebuilding my entire business infrastructure with AI agents. The DDS Vibe Academy is the publishing arm of that work — 31 free classes on AI coding, updated Monday through Friday.
Why I built it
I didn't set out to build an academy. I was learning to use Claude Code, then Cursor, then Antigravity, then Ollama for local inference. Every time I figured something out, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to figure it out again. Those notes became the first classes.
The academy exists because being the only solo founder in my industry with this material is lonelier than running it as a one-person publishing house. The classes are free because the trade is fair: if a class helps someone ship one thing, they owe nothing. If it helps them build a business, maybe they send a customer to my store someday.
How it was built
The academy hub at ddsboston.com/pages/dds-vibe-academy is itself a working artifact of the methodology. Here's the exact build chain:
- Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic) authored every Liquid section. 12 sections, 1 JSON template, approximately 6,400 lines, approximately 500 KB of code.
- Google Antigravity deployed every file to the Shopify storefront through the Shopify MCP protocol.
- Cowork (Anthropic) ran an autonomous browser audit that found 30 broken URLs and a z-index collision on the sticky navigation.
- Shopify MCP served as the write channel for all theme asset operations.
I did not write a line of code. I did not upload a file. I did not click "save" on the Shopify admin. I designed the constraints — the page structure, the CSS scoping rules, the color palette, the section architecture — and the agents handled the implementation.
What's in the curriculum
31 classes across four stages:
Foundation: Ollama for Windows, Shopify Sidekick, Gemini Code Assistant, Claude and Cursor onramps. Get a working setup. The shortest distance from zero to "I built something."
Development: Claude Code (2-part series), Google Antigravity (2-part series), Cursor 3, Gemini 3.1 Pro Deep Think, ChatGPT Images (2-part series), Hydrogen 2026, AI Cost Engineering.
Application: VibeTube AI, One-Prompt App Library, Sovereign Orchestrator, NicheForge, Synthetic Director. Where individual tools become end-to-end workflows.
Mastery: Atelier OS ($15.5M multi-agent AI system built in 52 hours), AGI Nexus V9.0 ($1M autonomous digital office), DDS Desktop Apps Portfolio.
The methodology
I call it DDS Vibe Coding. Five pillars: constraint-first design, progressive disclosure, deterministic rails, context hygiene, sovereign fallback.
The core idea: you don't learn AI. You become the architect. You define what the system should do. The model figures out how.
